More than half of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association’s customers support the use of nuclear power, a company official told a state legislative panel Tuesday.

Colorado’s second-largest utility is studying whether it would be feasible to build a nuclear power plant on a 16,000- acre site in southeastern Colorado.

The Westminster-based company would have to partner with another utility such as Xcel Energy or Public Service Co. of New Mexico because of the size and cost of a nuclear plant, Tri-State senior vice president Mac McLennan told the transportation legislation review committee. A nuclear plant typically costs billions of dollars and generates at least 1,000 megawatts of power.

Tri-State, which has about 2,400 megawatts of total generation capacity, sells wholesale power to 44 member rural utilities in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.

The company also is mulling coal- and natural-gas-fired plants at the site, located in Prowers County near Holly.

Tri-State polled members in its service region about nuclear power and “greater than 50 percent” support it, McLennan said.

Interest in nuclear power has increased because of rising energy costs and climate-change concerns, McLennan said. Nuclear power plants emit little, if any, greenhouse gas.

However, nuclear power still has its detractors because of concerns over safety and the disposal of radioactive waste.

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.